Blue Jacket Guy: I'm Not the Boston Bomber

I noticed that Newsweek editor Michael Moynihan was also tweeting skeptically about the two guys in the photo this morning and e-mailed him to ask why he thinks they’re innocent. Answer: He found their Facebook pages last night and says it seemed pretty clear from the volume of material about track and field, along with lots of other innocuous crap, that they’re unlikely to be the culprits.

By the way, this is why I think Ricin Elvis might not be the terrorist the authorities say he is. Liberty Lady found all his social media appearances before his name was officially announced (she figured it out by the initials "KC" and his frequent mentions of key quotes, like "I'm KC and I approved this message).

Here's "KC" reacting to the Boston Massacre:

we the people are just not safe anymore! I mean bombs where folks are “racing”??? Elephants in Tupelo Circus getting SHOT??? What next! I guess there will come a time when Elvis fans can’t even go out to watch a bunch of Elvis Impersonators pay tribute to a man who gave his life for we the people! Geesh! It’s a sad sad world!

That doesn't seem to fit the psychology of a poison-pen-letter killer. While one could say "Oh, he's putting on appearances, maintaining a simulacrum of normal behavior," I've gotta say I don't buy that. People who do this sort of thing -- killers, psychopaths, maniacs, violent extremists, terrorists -- are so driven by their weird demons that they are pretty proud to announce them publicly.

If you think about escalation, it starts with angry denunciations, then goes to threats, then goes to stalker-type behavior, and then proceeds to actual violence. I'm not sure that a guy so crazy he sends ricin to the president is in control of his shit enough to maintain appearances on his Facebook posts.

And I'm not sure the truly crazy know what sane looks like enough to fake it when required. Jared Loughner and James Holmes, for example, were plainly insane in their social media postings. It might have provided them some help at trial to pretend to be sane, but they didn't bother, or they didn't know what a sane person might sound like.

Anyway... I still sort of think we're going to find out this guy has some castor bean plants growing by his house and the "ricin" detected was castor pollen or something.

The other day on Breibart I noted that I gave the media a pass for all its erroneous reporting on these matters, because, honestly, I'd rather have the unvetted rumor now than the nailed-down story later.

Andrew McCarthy, however, points out that a wash of erroneous information is detrimental to investigations-- and helpful to terrorists.

[M]ost journalists and many agents are not well-versed in the esoterica of the justice system — in which, for example, “arrest” is different from “custody”; a “suspect” is different from a “person of interest”; and “detention” is different from “apprehension” —

I keep pointing this out. The media is as ignorant about these distinctions as it is about the difference between a semi-automatic and automatic weapon.

-- and you have the roadmap to error-ridden reporting. The problem is not that reporters and sources are intentionally misleading the public. It is that their information is both less reliable than they think it is and easily given to miscommunication. A potential witness’s voluntary submission to a law-enforcement interview could be mistaken for a suspect’s surrender to police custody. Solid leads on a potential bomber based on video and forensic evidence could be miscommunicated as a solid identification of a suspect. The issuance of an arrest warrant for a person not in custody could be miscommunicated as an actual arrest.

...

And even worse than its effect of confusing and angering the public is the help it gives the terrorists. The leak-generated misinformation puts pressure on investigative agencies to correct the record; these public corrections give the terrorists insights into the state of the investigation that they would not otherwise have. It makes them harder to catch.

Well, now that you put it like that.

By the Way: There's a puppet show in France, like Britain's Spitting Image, called Les Guignols d'Info. A day after the Boston attack, they announced the winners of the Marathon -- a severed leg, a severed arm, and a limbless torso. It's at 1:46 to 1:50 or so, here. It's in French but the "joke" (I use the term advisedly) is visual and obvious enough.

I don't know if it's really worth noting that there is a lot of bad taste in the world. Also, of course, a lot of bad comedy; this is the sort of joke an amateur seventh-grader thinks up. It's usually not thought of as being professional level work.

If you want revenge, you already have it: These assholes are puppeteers.

(If you want a brief translation of how Le Figaro introduced that clip: With the question, basically, "Did the Guignols go too far?" Wikipedia tells me the show is "leftist and populist" and often accused of presenting a dumbed-down version of the news to dumbed-down people. And it's accused of being anti-American as well. I think we can safely move that out of the "accused" category to "declared.")

Dang it my brain is still trying to come up with the plural of asshole.